This article will help answer the fundamental questions around why Customer Experience Matters:
- What is customer experience?
- Why is the customer experience so crucial for your business?
- What is main the difference between customer experience and customer service?
- Top tips to ensure your customer has a great experience!
To start with, what is a customer experience?
We live in a hyper-connected world, where clicks, reviews, and feedback on businesses and products often impact consumer demand more than professional advertisements can. Companies should implement a carefully designed customer experience and journey for any business to thrive.
A customer’s experience is their impression as they go through the journey of buying or interacting with your business. The customer experience develops from every interaction the customer has with your brand, from the advertisement they see, navigating your website, purchasing a product, and even enjoying the product/ service as intended. A positive customer experience is so essential because it is the public’s perception of your brand and directly affects vital growth metrics, such as repeat business and brand loyalty.
Customer service and other interactions can notably be affected by the customer experience and perception of your product and brand, and influence how likely they are to provide you with repeat business. Excellent customer service is just one cornerstone of a great customer experience.
Why is the customer experience so crucial for your business?
Veterans well know in the business, marketing, and entrepreneurial sectors that sustainable growth of any brand is rooted in outstanding customer experience. Customers who have a positive experience and interaction with your business have a higher chance of developing brand loyalty, encouraging brand advocacy/promotion helping you retain and grow your customer base.
In our online-word of e-commerce, rankings, reviews, and speedy deliveries, it is the customers who have the power, not the sellers anymore. Due to the vast market competition, customers have almost endless alternatives when deciding where to spend their hard-earned money. Information from other customers in the form of reviews and feedback often informs customers’ decisions even more than prices do. Every new, emerging, or even established business needs to continuously focus, refine and update its customer experience. This continual improvement ensures your customers are not just loyal but also provides you with positive organic exposure; ‘customers are your best resource for growing your brand awareness.’
What are the benefits of a great customer experience?
The benefits of delivering a great customer experience include:
- Improved customer loyalty and repeat business.
- Better word-of-mouth marketing to look-a-like audiences.
- Increased customer satisfaction and association with your brand.
- Online positive reviews and recommendations increase search operations.
Still to this day, the most effective and impactful marketing you can hope for is that of a customer willing to advocate for your business or products. Customers do this by posting reviews on social media, promoting your products through word-of-mouth, and organically acting as unofficial brand ambassadors. By ensuring you have thoroughly defined, tested, and refined your customer journey, you will have a better chance of repeat business. In addition, you can rely on positive reviews and referrals to promote your brand while reducing the frustration, dropout rate, complaints, and product refunds you have to issue along this journey.
What are the differences between customer experience and customer service?
Fundamentally, customer service is a component of customer experience, and a large one at that. The customer experience is grown from multiple impressions and interactions with your company and brand. Some may be from specific and direct interactions with your brand, for example, when a customer asked questions by calling, emailing, or messaging you to request information or further information about your services. However, many other steps and components determine the customer’s experience with your brand, not only your level of customer service.
Simply put, the customer experience is much more significant than customer service alone. It includes every impression, memory, understanding, interaction, and touch-point with your business. This experience starts when a customer first learns about your product from a friend, a google search, or a blog, through the customer journey where they receive and rate the product.
Top tips to ensure your customers have a great experience!
It is essential to measure your customer’s feedback and act on relevant issues to address gaps in your service delivery. This feedback gives you the insight needed to ensure you are providing an elevated level of customer experience. There is no singular guide to improving customer experience as much of this depends on the business, products, and services you offer. However, here are some common areas and focal points you may want to consider when trying to build or improve your customer experience:
- Put customer feedback and communication as a top priority. The biggest reason for poor reviews and customer churn is frustration with the lack of contact with a company.
- Use and encourage customer feedback to better understand the needs and wants of your market base.
- Create a system or schedule where your team can regularly collect feedback data, assess its merits and act accordingly to address any issues highlighted.
- Go the extra mile to reduce or solve problems and unique challenges a customer has. Let the customer see for themselves that you went above and beyond for them – it is the quickest way to spread brand loyalty.
What makes for a poor customer experience?
These are just a few points, but it is not a complex formula to create a good customer experience. It simply comes from asking your customers the right questions, gathering feedback, and putting plans into action, which will improve this journey over time. Bad customer experience is the number one reason customers switch brands or service providers. There are many reasons for terrible customer experience, and the overlap with customer service is apparent:
- A disconnect between what employees provide and what customers want.
- Longer than average waiting times to speak to a representative.
- A highly automated process that does not work efficiently or effectively.
Complex ordering processes or information to answer questions not readily available.
- Services and products which seem to be mass-produced and not personalized enough.
- The attitude and temperament of employees when dealing with queries and complaints.
- Product or service quality that was lower than expected or advertised.
Final Advice – Data-Driven Decision Making
We all know the world’s largest and most successful company is Amazon. According to the founder Jeff Bezos, they have become the most successful business on the planet because they collect the most data on their customers and always puts the customer first. The company gathers more than 2,000 historical and real-time data points on every customer and is constantly making the customer experience more accessible, quicker, and faster. Amazon is an excellent example of why you should consider building on your customer experience journey using data-driven decision-making and why gathering customer feedback is crucial to your business.
Use 2talk’s Cloud PBX to Kick-off a Positive Customer Experience
For many customers, they want to call your business so they can communicate with someone – immediately, and personally. There are, of course, email, online contact forms, chatbots, and live chat agents, but nothing quite beats a phone conversation.
We are seeing more and more of our customers reverting to the telephone to communicate with their customers. They’re improving customer satisfaction by implementing 2talk’s advanced call-flow features, included in every Calling Plan, like:
- Welcome messages – to greet new callers and give them upfront information on the company, and often the call flow.
- Auto Attendant – gives the caller the option to be directed to the right department or person immediately.
- Call Queue – Businesses with a higher volume of calls put the caller into a queue for a set amount of time and keep them updated on the status before the call is connected.
- Time of Day Routing – used in conjunction with Time Schedules, you can send callers to different call centers or departments without delay.
Talk with us about implementing 2talk’s Cloud PBX
Get in touch with our team on 800 283 1332 or chat with us right here on our website! Hey, you can even send us an email at sales@2talk.com.
We’ll help you get your great customer communication experience underway for as little as $12.50 per month!
